William Savery

After spending a year at UVM playing and after a few more months working at Howe Scales, I joined the Army and became a Russian interpreter from 1963 to 1967 as a staff sergeant in ASA. I then came back to UVM and graduated in 1969 with a B.A. in German / Russian. I then attended SUNY at Buffalo where I received my Masters 1972 in German Literature. I continued on and got my ABD but never finished my PhD.
In 1978 I got a job at a private catholic boys highschool in Buffalo, St. Joseph's Collegiate Institute, where I spent the next 30 happy years teaching mostly German but also some Russian and some math. In 1978 I also met my future wife, Theresa. During the next 30 years I took 10 groups of high school kids to Germany as director of the Buffalo / Dortmund Sister City Committee. Every third summer I took 20+ kids to Germany for a month and hosted 20+ German kids for a month here in Buffalo. For the last 20 years I also ran another yearly program whereby 9 to 15 German teens spent 4 months here in Buffalo attending school. I loved my job, and I loved watching my kids in school, where they both took German so I saw them every day for all four years. In 2007 I got injured and had a total knee replacement, followed in 2009 by knee replacement on my other knee and vocal cord surgery. I was forced to retire and I don't really like retirement. Three months ago I had major spinal fusion surgery so I'm not in the best of shape. I've had a good life, a great family, and the wonderful feeling of being totally trusted in my job of positively inflluencing youth.

One of my favorite stories about my time at MSJ concerns a science project. While trusted to work alone in the science lab constructing a Tesla Coil, my group used a soldering iron to cut a line in the floor tile around the entire lab. Or is my favorite story about several of us skipping school at the end of our senior year and going to Steve's camp?